Portrait of a Mentor

Maxwell Perkins is the rare book editor who achieved lasting fame. His nurture of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe made him something like the Platonic ideal of mentorship. A new movie, “Genius,” is centered on his relationship with Wolfe and the massive edits that preceded the publication of Wolfe’s novel “Look Homeward, Angel.”

The first interest in turning A. Scott Berg’s National Book Award-winning biography of Perkins into a movie came in the spring of 1978, just before the book was published. In a recent phone interview, Berg said Universal Studios was developing it at the time, until it landed on a particular executive’s desk. “I was told that he got to Page 3 and said: ‘Wait a minute, this is a movie about a book editor? We’re not making this movie.’ ”

Sixteen years ago, Berg’s friend the playwright and screenwriter John Logan expressed interest in adapting it. They agreed that showing too much of the act of writing on-screen was a no-no, though if any writer had a cinematic process, it was the 6-foot-6 Wolfe. “He used to stand at the refrigerator and throw pages into crates,” Berg said. “It’s almost like Jackson Pollock. It’s action writing. And every now and then he’d bring the crates into Max Perkins and say, ‘Is it a book?’ ”

Berg’s active pursuit of Colin Firth to play Perkins finally set the project to full boil. Jude Law portrays Wolfe, and while the diminutive actor isn’t a ringer for the physically imposing novelist, Berg said adjustments were made: “We’ve dirtied him up a little, made him more unkempt than we usually see him.”

Quotable

“I don’t like neatness in anything except my house. Life is messy, and overly explained stories don’t give readers full credit.” — Laura Lippman, in an interview with BookReporter

Not Asking Permission

This week, Jaimy Gordon reviews C.E. Morgan’s new novel, “The Sport of Kings.” Morgan, who grew up in Ohio before attending Berea College in Kentucky and then Harvard Divinity School, has never divulged much about her biography. But in a recent interview with the magazine Commonweal, she offered a few tantalizing notes. “I have not needed to go to a text to discover or ruminate on lack; I’ve experienced it in my own life,” she said. “Anyone who lives with poor health or chronic pain, or who has endured poverty — real poverty — knows what it is to live with lack and a resulting fear so incessant that it becomes ­thoroughly normalized, invisible in its ubiquity.” Responding later to a question about the sensitivity of a white writer addressing the subject of race, Morgan offered this impassioned answer, in part: “I have both experienced and witnessed a great deal of suffering in my life, and that has informed my art. I’m here today because I’m a fighter. I didn’t survive my life to ask permission to write my books.”